Have Ecological Human Rights Been Globally Lost? A Conflict of Ecological Spatial Requirements and Cultural Landscape Opportunities in Modern Homo sapiens

Abstract

The commonly respected set of human rights includes the right for food and water, which are direct consequences of the biological design of our species. However, as we argue, this list of inherent rights is not complete, as illustrated by the analysis of ecological space scaling and social group size in other mammalian species. The size of individually controlled territory (home range), which scales proportionally to body mass, is estimated to be of the order of 4 km2 per individual in a mammalian species equal in size to Homo sapiens. The urbanized landscapes of modern civilization, with concentrated living at high population densities, violate this inherent ecological demand of the species. The behavioral, biological, ecological, and social causes and consequences of this violation are discussed. It is argued that coping with the global ecological and environmental challenges will be impossible without focused scientific studies of the genetically encoded ecological requirements of our species.